I’ve recently become addicted to baking bread. I don’t know why, but it has the same kind of magic as music and software testing; so I’ll try to make some analogies. Results – The best bread results come when there is long fermentation time, just as when a tester can spend a long time with […]
I spent one day at Øredev 2008 (http://www.oredev.org) since they invited me to give the Where Testing Creativity Grows (http://www.thetesteye.com/papers/where_testing_creativity_grows.doc) presentation. I arrived ten minutes after the start of James Bach’s keynote The Renaissance Thinker, where he argued that 1972 (Chapel Hill) ruined good software testing. People started focusing too much on templates, processes, best […]
This years EuroSTAR took place in den Haag, a city that had quite some rain, but also beautiful autumn leaves, and big churches. The theme of the conference was “The Future of Software Testing”, and a recurring image was a traffic sign informing that the future is next turn to the right. I always thought […]
At EuroSTAR 2008 in Haag I will present “Testing is an Island – A Software Testing Dystopia”. The paper can be downloaded at http://www.thetesteye.com/papers/redgren_testingisanisland.doc The inspiration was the theme of the conference: “the future of software testing”; and I couldn’t stop seeing a very boring profession, where numbers and so-called objectivity is more important than people […]
At www.context-driven-testing.com you can read “Metrics that are not valid are dangerous.” I believe this is true, but I would rather prefer “Metrics are dangerous.” Uninterpreted measurements are not bad by themselves, but when value is added to them, they become metrics, and dangerous because they state specific things without considering a lot of other things, that […]
The variety of configurations (operating system, browser, language etc.) can look overwhelming; and it is impossible to test all possible configurations for Servers and Clients. On the other hand there are certain platforms that are more probable to uncover defects. This is just common sense, but I haven’t seen any terminology for handling this in […]
I have a friend that proof-reads every bug report before reporting; “otherwise there will be spelling errors”, she says. I have a friend that always reproduces the bug before reporting it, at least four times. I have friends that always ask “Bug or Feature?” or “One or two bugs?” when they are uncertain. I have […]
I just moved my profile to another domain, which meant I had to setup my Vista machine again. Besides stuff that makes the computer usable (show all files, don’t hide file name extensions etc.), I try to create many possibilities for software to fail. You know, a good tester is often lucky… * run as […]